Hindsight.

Artist Statement – Mission Statement

We, the collective of Humanity, have a rich narrative history which goes back thousands of years. For countless generations that history served the very clear purpose of educating us, identifying common ground, illuminating our identities and our cultures, and explaining our lives and experiences to us. It has always told us where we come from, who we are, and who we ought to aspire to be.

Now we live in a world where things change incredibly fast, and we are so disconnected despite our inter-connectivity that we have lost sight of much in the face of temporal chaos. Beneath the journey of our daily lives there are the same underlying, unifying, timeless truths of human experience: courage, compassion, empathy, perseverance, justice, mortality and legacy. I want to use art to awaken sensitivity in a generation that has been dulled by apathy, nihilism, and desensitization; great art can provide transcendence, clarity of vision, and a sense of purpose.

I want to contribute to the revival of, and reinvestment of value and interest in, traditional art-making, from which the public often seems to be a disenfranchised and alienated. Just as realistic representational art has been making a comeback for a couple of decades, I believe that those deeper, older, more-timeless parts of our humanity are in need of a revival as well. I believe that traditional realist art-making, coupled with our narrative tradition, has a unique capacity to serve that purpose just as it always has. To that end, I aim to produce Contemporary Classical Realist art that plumbs the heights of beauty, the depths of tragedy, and the outer reaches of the sublime; that has depth of meaning and that attempts to reconcile mortality and legacy. Work that does this while re-contextualizing, subverting, and bending the meaning of traditional narratives, archetypes, and icons, to speak to current issues that are relevant to us today.

Society, in the age in which we live in, has an unfulfilled holistic need and I believe traditional humanist art can help fill that need. I believe in the power and importance of humanism in art-making, as well as its ability to benefit society. I believe it is the vocation and responsibility of artists to create and promote values in society, to maintain and fortify the fabric of culture, and to work toward fulfilling the needs of both our communities and their individuals. That is the very important contribution I want to make to society and to my contemporaries, and it is the legacy I want to leave to future generations.